After the Mourning (12 page)

‘Behold, the great Abu Abdul!’ the Wazir said, in a voice I imagined he thought sounded grand. ‘The famous, the impossible Egyptian Head of old Cairo!’

Like everyone else I beheld. God alone knows how old he was, but his face was sunken at each side, which suggested that the Egyptian Head didn’t have a tooth in his bonce. The fez on top of it all was several sizes too big, which didn’t help to make the illusion any more regal. Old the Head was, but mysterious and special he was not.

‘Oooh,’ moaned the Head, and then again, ‘Oooh!’

I looked at Hannah, who looked back at me primly. This magician was an old friend of hers, after all.

‘Great Abu Abdul, you sound as if in pain,’ the Wazir said, in what, to his credit, was only just starting to be a Cockney accent. ‘Can we help you, O seer and magician of the mysterious desert sphinx?’

As in Lily’s tent, I could see right under the table to the curtains at the back of the booth. This Head, like the other, floated on a table top. Whether it was concealed under the table or hidden somewhere else, there had to be a body somewhere.

‘O mighty Wazir, it was the terrible Pharaoh Tutikamin what done for me!’ the Egyptian Head said, in an accent that owed more to Canning Town than Cairo.

Hannah nudged me. ‘What’s David doing with that old geezer? He had some pretty girl when I saw him years ago.’

‘The Wazir of the Pharaohs has obviously hit hard times,’ I said.

‘He ain’t just hit ’em,’ Hannah replied. ‘He’s gone right under.’

Fortunately we didn’t have to put up with too much more of the Egyptian Head act. After the Wazir had finished and before the next act, ‘Freddie the Dancing Dalmatian’, could come on, Hannah and I agreed to go backstage.

In spite of his performance, I still wanted to meet the Wazir David Green. I wanted to ask him why he’d never passed in front of the Egyptian Head at any time. Lily Lee hadn’t either.

‘Hannah Jacobs, as I live and piss!’ The little fat man now wearing a rusty Homburg over his shiny pate took my girl into his arms and squeezed her. She didn’t seem entirely comfortable with it.

‘Blimey, it has to be twenty years!’ He pulled away from Hannah the better to study her. ‘Still gorgeous, girl.’

‘David . . .’

‘Come in! Come in and have a drink,’ the magician said, as he waved us into his tiny, dust-grimed dressing room. Looking now at me he said, ‘Husband?’

‘Friend,’ Hannah said, before I could.

David Green, the Wazir, smiled. ‘You still . . .’

‘Mama and Papa don’t speak to me and I still make my living in that way with . . .’ Her voice petered out.

But the magician shrugged, indicating, I imagined, that he knew what Hannah did. He went over to the battered chest and mirror that passed for his artist’s dressing-table and poured some gin into a cracked half-pint glass. He handed this to Hannah, then turned questioningly to me.

‘No, thanks,’ I said.

‘Suit yourself,’ he said. He offered Hannah his dressing-table chair. ‘Sit! Sit, Hannah! God, it’s good to see you!’ He poured himself a truly enormous drink and laughed. ‘Old sinners like us, thrown out of our nests, we should stay together.’

But his face, which became suddenly very red, told another story: that he regretted what had just been said.

‘Yes,’ a grave-faced Hannah replied. ‘Davy—’

‘Christ, no one’s called me “Davy” since before the Flood!’ He laughed again, maniacally as drunks do. He was, it seemed, as much a refugee from the Jewish heartlands as Hannah. I wondered whether the drink had been his offence or whether he drank to dull the memory of whatever had happened many years before.

‘So, you caught the act,’ he said.

‘Yeah.’ Hannah took her fags out and lit one. ‘Egyptian Head was a woman last time I saw it.’

The magician sighed. ‘She left me.’

‘To go back to the Pyramids?’

He shot her an unforgiving look.

‘Back to Barking, then, was it?’ Hannah said, and then, with a quick glance up at me, got down to the business of why we had come. It seemed that she didn’t want to linger here. ‘Listen, Davy, my friend Frank here, he wants to ask you something about your act.’

David Green pulled himself up to his full height of, at most, five foot three, and said, ‘A magician never reveals his secrets.’

‘Mr Green,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to know how you perform your Egyptian Head illusion—’

‘Well, that’s fucking good, then, isn’t it!’ he said spitefully, and threw a quarter of a pint of gin down his neck. ‘’Cause I ain’t telling ya!’

‘Davy!’

‘What?’ His belligerence was as quick as it was shocking. ‘So, the turn stinks. I’ve still got my pride, you know! I thought, Hannah, that you’d come to see
me
!’

He fancied her, or so it seemed.

‘Davy, you and me were never . . . You were a mate. You
were
.’

‘Yes, well, if I’d been more than that maybe a lot of trouble would have been avoided.’

‘Oh, don’t you blame me for what you done!’

‘Little Hannah Jacobs, so prim and nice and don’t-touch-me, what became a whore for the
goyim
!’ As if he knew he’d gone too far, David Green stopped and his flabby face drained of all colour. ‘Hannah . . .’

Her face was like a thunderstorm. ‘Oh, that’s rich coming from a bloke who likes to fiddle about with little girls! Thought that might have slipped me mind, did you?’

‘Sssh!’ He took another swig from his glass, then put one shaky finger to his lips. ‘No one knows . . .’

Hannah looked at me. ‘Davy here stuck his hands in the rabbi’s daughter’s knickers. Blames me for it, so I now learn.’ She glanced at him and said, ‘He was twenty-eight and she was seven.’

‘No, no, no, no!’

I’d never seen Hannah like this before: nasty. I felt quite sorry for the poor bloke – or, rather, I would have done if he hadn’t been a pervert.

‘Just because I left our manor before you don’t mean I don’t keep in touch with people,’ Hannah said. ‘I know everything about what you done, Davy Green. Why’d’ya think I only come to see your show once in twenty years, an old mate like me? And we was good mates, but after what you done . . . Now, my mate Frank wants to ask you a few questions and I would suggest that you answer him – and polite, like, too.’

There was a moment when I thought he might hit me but then, maybe because deep down he knew he was too drunk and flabby to do me any harm, he slumped, sat down on his dressing-table and said, ‘So, Frank, what can I do for you?’

It wasn’t a comfortable situation and I could see he resented me, but I asked what I had to anyway.

‘I want to know,’ I said, ‘whether it’s possible in the illusion for the magician to stand in front of the booth and therefore in front of the Head?’

I’d given this some thought and I had an idea that mirrors had to be involved – not that I knew how at that moment.

‘I won’t say why but no,’ he said, ‘that ain’t possible.’

‘Are there mirrors under the table?’ I asked.

‘Reflecting the audience? Don’t be daft!’

‘No, reflecting something else,’ I said. And then a solution came to me. The body of the Head had to be somewhere. ‘If the mirrors come to a point in front of the table they’ll reflect the curtains of the booth that surrounds the act, won’t they?’ I became, I admit, quite excited by my idea. ‘It’d give the illusion from the front as if the Head was floating on top of the table. But the body would have to be behind the mirrors, wouldn’t it?’

David Green did not reply.

But it would explain why Lily had kept to one side of not only Django but the booth. If mirrors were in use she would have had to, as the Wazir had had to. The ‘Head’, if this solution was correct, had to appear through a hole in the table top. It made sense if, in spite of everything, I still had a creeping feeling that Lily’s ‘Head’ was somehow ‘real’. Partly it had to be because she was a Gypsy, with all the mysterious associations those people attract. I knew it was stupid, but then, in his next breath, David Green threw the question wide open again.

‘Course, I did see it done once with the magician walking in front of the act,’ he said. ‘When I was in the Kate, I was posted to Egypt, Alexandria. Shit-hole it was but there was this bloke, Arab, done this turn like it was something real. Don’t know how.’

‘What do you mean “real”?’ I asked.

‘His Head, this Arab bloke’s, it was truly just a head,’ David Green replied. ‘I walked all round it, right close up.’

‘And you couldn’t see any trickery?’ I asked.

‘No,’ the magician replied. ‘Not a bit of it. Give me the right willies, I can tell you.’

‘’Ere, Davy, want to go for a pint, do ya?’ The voice was old and it came from a familiar head, which had just poked itself around the door of David Green’s dressing room.

‘All right, Stan,’ David Green replied, and Abu Abdul’s head disappeared as quickly as it had materialised.

‘Stan, see,’ David Green explained, after the old man had left, ‘needs his body. If he didn’t he wouldn’t look half as funny as he does when he’s smashed out of his head on light and bitter.’

I had seen no one in the Gypsy camp so far who could have been Lily’s Head, yet he had to be there somewhere. Whatever David Green’s Arab had done in Alexandria had to have been an illusion in itself. A head couldn’t live without a body – could it?

We left the Empire at just before nine and as we walked out into the cold night air we peered up nervously into the blackness of the sky. No Jerries as yet but I, like millions of others, knew they would come.

‘I’ll take you home,’ I said to Hannah, as I moved her in what I hoped was a southerly direction. It’s not always easy to know in the blackout.

‘Yes, but if there’s a raid you can run off like you do,’ Hannah said, as she squeezed my arm affectionately. ‘I’ll find a shelter. I’m a big girl now.’

I smiled. Although she doesn’t understand, no one who wasn’t in the first lot can, Hannah accepts how I am in raids and doesn’t try to stop me doing what I have to do.

‘Your old mate Davy turned out to be a bit of a character,’ I said, after we’d lit the fags we knew we shouldn’t in the depths of the blackout.

‘He’s a dirty bastard,’ Hannah replied simply.

‘And you really, really don’t like him, do you?’

‘He fiddled with a young kiddie.’

‘So why did we go and see him, Hannah?’ I said. ‘If you dislike him?’

She sighed first, then smiled up at me. ‘Because you wanted to find out about the Head and Davy’s the only person I know who does that sort of thing.’

‘I would have lived if you hadn’t, love,’ I said. ‘I’d do anything rather than hurt you, even indirectly.’

‘And that’s why I took you,’ Hannah said. ‘Because you’d do anything for me.’

‘Oh, Hannah.’ I went to kiss her but she turned away as she sometimes does when I show her what she feels is too much affection. Even without her ‘work’ on the streets dividing us, we can never be together on account of our respective religions. So we both know that what we have is hopeless. It just hurts Hannah a little bit more than me, I think, when I show her my feelings.

Experience told me to change the subject. ‘So, David Green,’ I said, ‘did he go to prison or . . .’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘Just as we take care of our own, we also punish them,’ Hannah said. ‘David Green won’t be going back to his old home in the Montefiore Buildings or anywhere else off the Highway till the day he dies. Not after what he done and what was done to him.’

‘I thought you said he put his hand in the little girl’s knickers?’

‘Oh, he done a lot more than that, H, believe me,’ Hannah said. ‘He ruined that child for ever.’

It was cold, but after those words I felt even colder. What David Green had done was inhuman. I could only imagine how those who had found out about it had punished him.

‘How do you know all about it?’ I asked Hannah. ‘Whatever was done to Green was done outside the law, and I imagine people wanted to keep it quiet. And you . . .’

‘Even dead as I am to my mum and dad, I got to know about my little cousin and what David Green done to her.’

I stared down at her, and she said, ‘Yes, my uncle Nathan is a rabbi and, yes, some men in my family did break David Green’s nose and his ribs for his pains. Got off lightly, I’d say. I don’t think he’s ever had real relations with an adult woman. Maybe if I had given in to his sweaty wandering hands when we was both children . . .’

‘You can’t think like that,’ I said, reeling inside from yet another new piece of information about Hannah. It’s always the same with my girl. ‘There’s no excuse for rape, Hannah,’ I said. ‘There’s enough ways that men can deal with their urges . . .’

‘Using women like me, yes,’ Hannah said.

‘Hannah . . .’

‘Put them fags out!’ a loud voice yelled, from somewhere in front of us. ‘There’s a fuckin’ war on!’

We threw our fags down and walked on in silence. Such overpowering darkness as you get in the blackout is quite suitable for some trains of thought. I’ve always known that East-Enders look after their own – Jews may do it one way and Gentiles another but basically it all comes out the same. Everyone has their own customs and traditions, including the Gypsies in the forest. But punishment is universal and people treat certain crimes very seriously indeed. David Green, I now felt, had got off lightly, as Hannah had said, and, as a consequence, was a very lucky man. In some quarters, maybe away from men of religion like Hannah’s uncle, he might have been killed.

The sirens started up then, as they always do, with a hellish rising wail.

Chapter Nine

P
eople often say after something terrible has happened that they had bad feelings beforehand or a premonition about it. Most of the time, of course, that’s a load of rot. But the next day I did feel strange – or, rather, what passes for strange with me. We all worked hard. Two families in Boundary Road had gone down with diphtheria some time before. Now the first deaths had occurred – two little sisters in one family and a girl of sixteen in the other. Five nippers were still fighting for their lives in the isolation hospital, and both sets of parents looked like ghosts. When I went round to the first house, the Wattses’, to measure up and offer my condolences, the mother said to me, ‘I don’t see no sense to it, Mr Hancock. I don’t see God or Jesus or none of it in nothing.’